I’m happy to announce bifrost, the Hosted Chef’s new permission manager, was successfully deployed yesterday at 11:30 AM PDT. The deploy took longer than we had estimated based on over a dozen rehearsal deploys. We apologize for the inconvenience of the outage and longer-than-normal deploy window.

The folks at Google have just published a major update to “knife-google” plugin for Google Compute Engine. Included in this update is a removal of the “gcutil” tookit as an external dependency, meaning that knife-google users can talk directly to the Compute Engine API to spin up new GCE instances and manage them with Chef.

I recently wrote about the updates coming soon to Hosted Chef. In particular I described a brand-new permissions manager then scheduled to be deployed the evening of 5/8. This deploy did not occur.

This release adds a feature for setting user passwords on Solaris, fixes a bug in Resource.const_defined?, and adds SSL root certificates to the Omnibus packages. Ranjib Dey added support for Google Cloud Engine Linux (GCEL), Google’s Ubuntu derivative. Thanks Ranjib! You’re this releases MVP!

#ChefConf 2013 was a roaring success! Our second annual conference was full of great keynotes, insightful workshops, informative track sessions, and the awesome Chef community. #ChefConf 2013 sold out with more than 700 people in attendance and hundreds more watching the live video stream of the keynote sessions.

Over the next several weeks Opscode Engineering and Ops teams will be upgrading a number of systems in Hosted Chef. These upgrades are the result of months of behind the scenes hard work.

Immediately following #ChefConf 2013, we teamed up with our friends from Joyent and Boundary to co-host a Chef Hack Day. The idea: capture some of the excitement and buzz generated at #ChefConf and bring community members together to whip up some awesome code.

During #ChefConf 2013, we announced our first annual Awesome Community Chefs awards. The Chef community is full of many awesome individuals who contribute and do exceptional things every day.

Coming out of a seriously rockin’ #ChefConf a week ago, it’s time to profile more customer awesomeness in the Chef Community. This go round it’s a neighbor of ours here in Seattle – Cheezburger, one of the largest social humor sites in the world.